Integration of Boston Schools Intensifies Old Problems

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Much. of the anxiety is just below the surface. But there have been enough threats and violence to necessitate police. men inside and outside school buildings and to provide armed convoys for busloads of stu. dents.

Marches and demonstrations have been frequent and an at tendance boycott, along with the fears of parents concerned about their children's safety, has kept as many as one‐third of the 91,778 students out of school each day.

The trouble began with the ruling by Judge W. Arthur Garrity last June 21 stating that the Boston School Committee had deliberately maintained dual school system and that it must be desegregated, bringing together black and white children.

Boston's experience in desegregating shows the pitfalls of inadequate preparation and points up the infportance of having solid leadership in the principal's office.

Furthermore, it demonstrates the difficulty of trying to overcome attitudes frozen by generations of racial isolation that the schools were dirdcted to end.

The situation is testimony to what can happen when an intensely political school board, plagued by cronyism, spends the major portion of a decade not dealing with the educational woes of a decaying and mediocre school system, but trying to stave off busing.

Though the school board's response to desegregation has been essentially negative, many of the schools have remained outwardly calm, perhaps largely because of the leadership of such headmasters as Mr. Peterkin.

An example of the effects of leadership can be found in comparison of two high schools, Roslindale and Hyde Park,.predominantly white schools in white neighborhoods.

While Hyde Park has the atmosphere of a hospital emergency room with policemen running in and out and stu dents milling about, Roslindale maintains a halcyon air.

Busing has changed Hyde Park from 80 per cent white to 52 per cent black and Roslindale from 90 pet cent white to 70 per cent white.

Roslindale's headmaster, Donald Burgess, who used to be chairman of the mathematics department and a football coach at English High, has created an orderly environment in which the students are treated with respect tinged by paternalism. Discipline is swift and just.

Not to be underrated as factor in stabilizing Roslindale are the 70 members of the football team — half‐white, halfblack — who make up more than 10 per cent of the male portion of the student body of 1,200.

Not all‐schools in Boston are lucky enough to have football teams that are able to help defuse the tension. Efforts to achieve tranquillity are further hampered by the failure of some schools and the central headquarters to perform the human relations work with staff and community that experts warn ought to precede desegregation,

“The school system abdicated its responsibility,” said Mary Ellen Smith, head of the City‐Wide Educational Coalition, an independent community group. “By and large, ours hag been the only real effort to solicit citizen participation.”

To the school system's credit, it cooperated in bringing, to Boston people from other cities to tell about their experiences ht desegregating. A former school official from Pontiac, Mich., for example, described how to search the tailpipes of buses for dynamite sticks.

But little preparation was made to cope with the uneasiness and resentment of the thousands of students who were uprooted from high schools at which they had spent a year or two and sent to new schools. Wearing jackets and class rings from their former schools, they seek out familiar faces and talk about the clubs, teams and friendships they had to give up.

Some youngsters, white and black, may be compelled to change schools yet again when the second phase of the desegregation program is implemented next year. So far, only 80 of the city's 200 schools are involved.

Overcrowding Feared

Besides the break in educational continuity, there have been massive scheduling snafus because records did not always follow students and some youngsters are winding up in unsuitable courses and others in no courses at all

The problems are expected to be further compounded by wercrowding as the boycott weakens. Moreover, no one seems to have figured out how the students are going to make up their missed work.

The boycott and hostile reaction by many whites to desegregation are a source of dismay to black students such as Wayne Crawford, a husky ninth‐grader who rides a bus each morning for 15 or 20 minutes from his neighborhood in Dorchester to Roslindale.

“What really hurts,” he said, “is that Boston is supposed to be the hub of education and it isn't even up to integrating it self. The Boston schools are really messed up.”

The notion that the school system is “really messed up” was expressed by some white observers here a long time ago.

John P. Doherty, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said that, when he was growing up in the working‐class Irish section of Charlestown, “the only ones who went to public schools were those kids whose parents didn't care about them.”

For generations, many’ of Boston's most able students have attended the three prestigious public junior‐senior high schools to which entrance is open only by examination—Latin High, Girls Latin and’ Boston Technical.

Much of the remainder of the intellectual cream has been skimmed off by Roman Catholic and other nonpublic schools, which account for 15 to 20 per cent of the city's schoolage youngsters.

Many Drop Out

Languishing in their secondrate status, the public schools have produced more than one dropout for every four graduates. Only about half of those graduates go on to post‐secondary education, and an extremely modest vocational education program has left most of the rest prepared for neither the job market nor college.

“Vocational education is one of the most backward aspects of the Boston public schools,” said Dr. Joseph M. Cronin, education aide to Gov. Francis W. Sargent. “The system has dragged its feet for the last six or eight years on, adopting what could be a very good program for changing the situation.”

It, is a system in which the average ninth‐grader in a nonexamination school reads at about a seventh‐grade level. Yet, remedial reading programs are nonexistent at some high schools, and corrective measures have not been adopted even in connection with desegregation.

Dr. William J. Leary, a harddriving reformer who became school Superintendent two years ago, has encountered many frustrations in trying to institute changes. He set up reading department, but has been thwarted in attempts to fund it, so that the director, instead of an annual salary, must be paid on a per diem basis.

Thus, along, with ameliorating racial hostilities, Boston must also take big strides to upgrade the quality of its schools if desegregation is to lead to meaningful, equal opportunity.

There are glimmers of hope in the desegregation’ problem, however, as was shown earlier this week at troubled Hyde Park High, where Mark O'Dowd, a psycholOgy teacher, suggested that his class might like to talk about Boston's racial conflict.

“We know you white people hate us,” a black girl told her classmates as she began to speak.

A white girl quickly challenged her, and soon the two were locked in dialogue that led both to ask why their fellow students had voluntarily segregated themselves, the whites sitting on one side of the room, the blacks on the other.

“When it was brought to their attention,” remarked the 28‐year‐old Mr. O'Dowd, “some of the white and black students, on their own, ‘got up and exchanged seats. There was a real spirit of cooperation, an attitude of ‘Let's get this thing settled.’ ”

A version of this archives appears in print on September 29, 1974, on Page 49 of the New York edition with the headline: Integration of Boston Schools Intensifies Old Problems. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe